Hope and Feminist Theory

Rebecca Coleman, Debra Ferreday

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317981763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Hope is central to marginal politics which speak of desires for equality or simply for a better life. Feminism might be characterised as a politics of hope, a movement underpinned by a utopian drive for equality. This version of hope has been used, for example in Barack Obama's phrase 'the audacity of hope' – a mobilisation of an affirmative politics which nevertheless implies that we are living in hopeless times. Similiarly, in recent years, feminism has seen the production of a prevailing mood of hopelessness around a generational model of progress, which is widely imagined to have 'failed'. However, as a number of feminist theorists have pointed out, the temporality of feminism cannot be conceived as straightforwardly linear: feminism can only be imagined as having failed if it is understood as a particular set of relations and things.

This collection grapples with the question of hope: how it figures and structures feminist theory as both a movement towards certain goals, and as inherently hopeful. Questions addressed include: Does hope necessarily imply a fantasy of perfectibility, a progression to a utopian future? Might it also be conceived in other ways: as an attachment?A lure? Does life tend towards hope, happiness, optimism? And, if so, what are the consequences when hope fails? Who decides which hopes are false? What is the cost of giving up hope?

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research.

Introduction: Hope and Feminist Theory

Rebecca Coleman and Debra Ferreday

Hope is central to marginal politics which speaks of desires for equality or simply for a better life. Feminism, for example, might be characterised as a politics of hope, a movement underpinned by a utopian drive for full equality. This version of hope has been highly visible in the discourse of political liberalism, most notably in Barack Obama’s phrase “the audacity of hope”, a mobilisation of an affirmative politics which nevertheless implicitly reproduces the notion — emergent at the time of the election but growing ever more pervasive at the time of writing — that we are living in hopeless times. The widespread investment in Obama as a figure of hope — an investment which stretched far beyond the borders of the United States — indicates a need for hopefulness, which in itself suggests that the time of hope is already past. Such a notion of hopelessness suggests that hope exists always in memory: as an object of nostalgia, of mourning, of regret. This regret may mean a recasting of past hopes as false, as, for example, in the hopefulness that attended the election of the UK Labour government in 1997: in the light of the 2010 Chilcot inquiry into Iraq, the hope invested in Tony Blair can seem deluded, even decadent. If lost hope is imagined as having been justified but not satisfied, on the other hand, it becomes the object of nostalgia: a condition which already applies to the sheer relief that greeted Obama’s succession of George W. Bush in 2009 and which is already, a year later, impossible to write of except in a rather wistful past tense. Hope, the last fragile thing to exit Pandora’s box, is a frail creature that is always in danger of being lost.

Such a narrative of hope as having passed is a familiar one in relation to feminist theory, as well as feminist politics more generally. In recent years, feminism has seen the production of a prevailing mood of hopelessness around a generational model of progress, which is widely imagined to have “failed”. Feminism has been so successful in achieving particular equalities that young women see it as irrelevant and (worse?) as boring (McRobbie 2004, 2008). It seems that to speak of hope in the context of feminism, then, is necessarily to speak of hopelessness; hope is, in Mary Zournazi’s (2002, p. 15) terms, “what sustains life in the face of despair”.

Zournazi’s (2002) collection of interviews with academics and writers on the topic of hope has been a central point of inspiration for this collection. In thinking through the future of feminist theory, we take as our starting point her claim that hope is “not simply the desire for things to come, or the betterment of life. It is the drive or energy that embeds us in the world — in the ecology of life, ethics and politics” (Zournazi 2002, p. 15). Indeed, in his analysis of theories of hope, which takes as its starting point the scant attention that has been paid to hope and a recent growing interest in it in the context of the emotional turn, Darren Webb (2007, p. 67) recognises “an important distinction between … two sets of questions: those concerning the nature of hope (what hope is) and those concerning its characteristics (what it is to hope)”. Furthermore, he argues that:

two overarching meta-modes of hoping can be identified. The first is directed towards a specific objective and takes the form of “I hope that/for p”. The second lacks a concrete objective and takes the form of an open-ended orientation towards the future. (Webb 2007, p. 68)

Webb’s point here about the two “meta-modes of hoping” — which he calls “goal-directed hope” and “open-ended hope” — echoes Zournazi’s insights and can also be found in other work on hope: for example, the goal-directed hope provided by the beauty industry (see, for example, Peiss 1998) and by new medical technologies and developments (see, for example, Novas 2006), and the open-ended hope involved in what Webb calls the “patient hope” that Gabriel Marcel writes of, where “hope refuses to lay down conditions, makes no claims on the future and insists on nothing” (Webb 2007, p. 69), and Ernst Bloch’s hope, “experienced as a restless, future-orientated longing for that which is missing” (Webb 2007, p. 71).

The essays in this collection commit to explore further the apparent tension between hope as tied to particular “things to come” and as a “drive or energy”. That is, they all grapple in some way with how hope figures and structures feminist theory as a movement directed towards achieving certain goals (of full equality, for example) and as a movement which is in itself inherently hopeful. They are all attempts to consider carefully what it might mean to theorise the affirmative, where, as Maureen McNeil’s short position paper on the turn to the affirmative in recent feminist work on nature and the material warns, to theorise the affirmative and/or to theorise affirmatively should not mean the loss of the critical edge of feminism.¹ In this sense, and as we explore further below, these essays might be characterised as doing a kind of cultural studies of hope, which Sara Ahmed (2007, p. 7), writing on happiness, describes as “a willingness to refuse to consent to its truth”. For Ahmed, what is so important about cultural studies is this willingness, which “suspends belief”:

In this mode of suspension, we can consider not only what makes happiness good, but also how happiness participates in making things good. Cultural studies can allow us to explore how happiness can make certain truths “true” and certain goods “good”. (Ahmed 2007, p. 7)

Drawing on this argument in relation to hope, we are suggesting that what is involved in an “affirmative” theorisation of hope and feminist theory is not necessarily a belief that hope is true and good (although it may well turn out that hope is, indeed, “good”), but rather a consideration of what hope does.² Does hope necessarily imply a fantasy of perfectibility, a progression to a utopian future, or might it also be conceived of as an attachment, a tendency, an inclination, a lure? Does life tend towards hope, happiness, optimism? And, if so, what are the consequences when hope fails? Who decides which hopes are false? What is the cost of giving up hope? Exploring hope in this way, we suggest, might help to understand and explore what has been argued to be both the success and failure of contemporary feminism.

Angela McRobbie’s work on the current situation of feminism provides a particularly helpful starting point for an understanding and contextualisation of how hope might be a concept that is worth exploring in relation to feminist theory. McRobbie’s (2004, p. 256) argument is that in Western post-industrial countries, feminism is involved in a “double entanglement”, where it is at once “taken into account” and “repudiated”. Focusing particularly on media representations of gender, femininity and sexuality, McRobbie suggests that certain aspects of feminist critique (including, but not restricted to, critiques of heteronormativity, the standardisation of a beauty ideal and restricted access to public spheres of education and work) have been so widely incorporated into mainstream culture that they are seen as arguments that have been won. Feminism, which may be acknowledged as important once, is now seen as been and gone — or, better, must be shown to have been and gone; due to its potential transformative power (which “haunts” the present), it must be repudiated. Thus, McRobbie (2004, p. 256) argues that feminism is “almost hated” (and we may wish to question that “almost”) and analyses examples from popular culture to demonstrate how young women in particular (are forced or encouraged to) distance themselves from feminism in order to show that they are not past it (see also Gill 2006).

What seems to be at stake in these, and other, arguments is that feminism is currently in crisis. This notion of crisis is not new, dating back at least as far as debates around post-feminism and third-wave feminism in the mid 1990s and in the academic feminism of the time (Einhorn 1995; Kaplan 1996; Whelehan 2000). Indeed, it is possible to argue that a narrative of a crisis “of” feminism (feminism having failed or being over) as well as “within” feminism is central to the third wave itself. This notion of crisis is particularly visible in popular feminist writing. Imelda Whelehan (2000, p. 194) typifies this when she claims that “a ‘crisis’ in feminism seemed to have been consensually acknowledged” as early as the mid-1980s; intriguingly, she attributes this to the increasing recognition at that time of differences within the category of “woman” and indeed the category of “feminism”, as feminism fragmented into “differing internal movements [with] their own do’s and don’ts” (Whelehan 2000, p. 211). Whelehan’s notion of an identity crisis in the women’s movement is further borne out in concerns about the ways in which feminism gets appropriated and twisted by consumer capitalism: in Natasha Walter’s (2010) claim, for example, that the notion of “women’s liberation” has been reduced to a sexual liberation which is, in reality, a resurgence of sexism. This individualising and isolating version of “liberation”, for Walter, masks a deep internal hopelessness, in which discomfort with the status quo is silenced.

A sense of feminism in crisis would seem to indicate that feminism is now hopeless. However, it seems to us that there may be other ways of conceiving the present state of feminism which suggests something else. For instance, if there is a crisis in feminism (and this point is debateable), this need not necessarily result in hopelessness. Gayatri Spivak (2002), for example, makes an explicit link between crisis and hope. Drawing on the resistance of “subaltern” groups, “cut off from lines of colonial mobility”, she argues that “bringing to crisis is an enabling moment”:

crisis is an un-anticipatable moment which makes something inherited perhaps jump into something other, and fix onto something that is opposed. For me, crisis is not the leap of faith because it brings faith into crisis, but rather is the leap of hope. And that’s how I would connect the potential of crisis and hope in resistances of all kinds. (Spivak 2002, p. 173)

Spivak’s connection here between resistance and hope is important for, on the one hand, it could be argued that a crisis of feminism is caused by the movement no longer being (able to be) resistant. McRobbie’s argument about the “double entanglement” of feminism points precisely to this situation. It is feminism’s success in becoming mainstreamed that produces a sense of hopelessness. Feminism has been so successful that its critical nature has been neutralised — hence the appropriation of feminism by George W. Bush as a major part of his rationale for going to war on the Taliban in Afghanistan, or, as Claire Colebrook explores in her essay in this collection, the figure of Republican US presidential hopeful Sarah Palin as “at least in some senses an effect (however monstrous) of feminist hope”. In terms of Spivak’s understanding, then, it would seem that the integration of feminism into “lines of colonial mobility” produces a moment of crisis not as enabling but, on the contrary, as disabling. According to such a position, feminism is no longer a progressive movement.

On the other hand, though, Spivak’s point regarding crisis as a “leap of hope” seems suggestive. In particular, Spivak’s explanation of crisis as “an un-anticipatable moment” is helpful in developing a different, more hopeful, understanding of feminism. This sense of un-anticipation as inherent in hope and hoping is evident not only in Spivak’s conceptualisation but also in how Brian Massumi (2002) links hope with affect.³ For Massumi (2002, p. 212), affect “gives you the feeling that there is always an opening to experiment, to try and see. This brings a sense of potential to the situation”. Massumi (2002, p. 211) thus wants to separate hope from “an expected success” and makes a distinction between hope and optimism in order to place hope “in the present” (emphasis in original). The notions of the relations between hope, optimism, temporality, affect and potential occupy a number of the essays here. Claire Colebrook, for example, argues that hope, which “seems to be the orientation beyond the present that splits the present”, is (for feminist theory in particular) both “intoxicating in its capacity to … open a world beyond the given” and “toxic [in] precluding us from acting and living in the now”. Rebecca Coleman and Mónica Moreno Figueroa examine the temporalities of hope through a focus on beauty as it emerged in their empirical research with white British girls and mestiza Mexican women. They conceive beauty as an embodied affect, an inclination (Berlant 2002) through which beauty is placed in the past or deferred to the future. Felicity Colman, drawing on Guattari’s concept of becoming-woman and working with and through the style of a manifesto, argues that feminist manifestos implicate and produce a particular gendered time, whereby (feminist) subjectivities can operate outside of market-based economies and “take action, … intervene, … re-imagine and reconfigure the forms of current existence”.

Such a focus on hope as both actual and potential, and as that which might be unanticipated, helps us to think through how the apparent crisis of feminism might be understood differently. In particular, what emerges across the essays in this collection is a rethinking of time as more complicated than a linear model would suggest. At stake in a number of these essays are questions involving the status of the past, present and future in and for feminist theory — for example, what is the role of the past in determining the present and future? How might desires for a better future be actualised? What is the condition and possibility of transformation in contemporary feminist theory? One of the ways in which feminism is seen to have failed is, as already indicated, through young women’s reluctance to identify as feminist and with feminism. Although this situation may not bear empirical “truth” (the activities of the London Feminist Network, as just one example, show that many young women are involved in feminist networking and campaigning), if we accept that young women find it difficult to see themselves as feminist, it is not only necessary to examine what “feminism” means for these women (and here Gill’s and McRobbie’s work, among others, is extremely helpful), but also to consider what temporality is attributed to the feminist movement. For example, as a number of feminist theorists have pointed out, the temporality of feminism cannot be conceived as straightforwardly linear.

Lisa Adkins (2004) offers a particularly interes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Hope and Feminist Theory
• 2. Toxic Feminism: Hope and Hopelessness after Feminism
• 3. The "Short Step" from Love to Hypnosis: A Reconsideration of the Stockholm Syndrome
• 4. Past and Future Perfect? Beauty, Affect and Hope
• 5. Notes on the Feminist Manifesto: The Strategic Use of Hope
• 6. Redefining Hope as Praxis
• 7. Reading Disorders: Online Suicide and the Death of Hope
• 8. Post-Millennial Feminist Theory: Encounters with Humanism, Materialism, Critique, Nature, Biology and Darwin
• Index